The New York Post today reports on an astounding fact that has been in plain sight for more than a year: Washington business scion Donald Graham has co-founded a scholarship program for young immigrants that is sending some of its students, and donor dollars, to colleges owned by Donald Graham’s own for-profit company.

When I read this fact in February 2014 in the Washington Post, the newspaper formerly owned by Graham’s company, I was taken aback. It seemed like a clear conflict of interest. But then, there have been many troubling actions by the for-profit college industry, including by Graham Holdings’ for-profit college …

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A blockbuster, year-in-the-making investigative series about the for-profit college industry appears online in the Miami Herald today, and, as industry analysts at BMO Capital Markets predicted earlier this week, “Obviously, this is not going to portray the industry in a positive light.” It doesn’t, but that’s because the industry practices and conduct that the Herald found are simply abominable. (I have studied bad actors in this industry for five years and have found the same.) With both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush already addressing this issue, it’s one that’s drawing increasing public attention.

The Herald‘s disclosures about the way for-profit colleges have ripped off students …

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This week the Washington Post editorialized against President Obama’s “gainful employment” rule, aimed at holding career training programs accountable for leaving students with insurmountable debt, without disclosing that the newspaper’s publisher, Katharine Weymouth, serves on the board of directors of a company that owns for-profit colleges and that is lobbying actively against the rule.

An April 27 masthead opinion from the Post’s editorial board declared that the gainful employment rule would “make it more difficult for poor Americans to earn a secondary degree” and cited favorably arguments made by Steve Gunderson, the head of the for-profit colleges trade association, APSCU. …

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Among the many questions raised by Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post newspaper is: What will become of the rest of the old Washington Post Company, publicly traded and run by the Graham family?

The fact is that the Post Company was already dominated, in several respects, by its lucrative Kaplan education subsidiary, which includes the Kaplan for-profit college division, as well as a standardized test preparation business.

Kaplan accounted for 55 percent of the Post Company’s revenue last year. By the time of a long, tortured 2011 Post newspaper investigation of how Kaplan had come to dominate the …

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Several years of public scrutiny have exposed that many of America’s for-profit colleges are playing a cruel joke on students and taxpayers — high-priced, low-quality programs, sold through deceptive recruiting practices, that often leave students without good jobs and deep in debt. This scam has cost taxpayers as much as $33 billion in a single year. Worse, it has ruined the lives of students — veterans, single mothers, and others struggling to build a better future. For-profit colleges have 12 percent of U.S. college students but a shocking 47 percent of student loan defaults.

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Some Members of Congress are stepping up to increase oversight over the for-profit college industry, which is heavily subsidized by taxpayers but which continues to abuse our veterans and other students.

As a part of this effort, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) sought to report about the salaries of top executives at these companies. Keep in mind that more than 86 percent of the funds for 30 major for-profit colleges studied by Congress come from taxpayers. So that means that these execs are essentially living large on the public dole.

One major company, Kaplan, which is owned by the Washington Post, refused …

Corinthian Colleges CEO Jack Massimino and National Urban League CEO Marc Morial held a conference call this afternoon to announce an “Historic Educational Partnership.” Corinthian, a for-profit education company, plans to provide “approximately” $1 million for an Urban League program to help 200 students in Orlando, Florida, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to prepare for the GED exam so they can pursue college. The Urban League has made extraordinary contributions to our country, and GED preparation programs deserve strong support, but there are questions about how Corinthian earned this money, and whether such gifts from for-profit schools to non-profit groups are aimed …

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The Washington Post Company seems on the verge of turning its flagship newspaper into a brochure for the company’s controversial, taxpayer-funded for-profit college division, Kaplan. The latest participant in this process is one of the world’s most accomplished men, Bill Gates. At a time when veterans groups, state attorneys general, and others are seeking reforms to prevent abuses by for-profit schools, Gates recently published — in the Post — an enthusiastic review of a book by Kaplan’s CEO. Gates failed to inform readers that the finances of his own Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are linked to the Post / …